Big Kevin

Chapter One: Forty-One Years of Working Things

Ted Rudkin's shed leaked in eleven places, and he could have told you where all eleven were with his eyes shut, in order, going clockwise.

He did not fix them. Fixing them would have meant getting up on the roof, and the roof was the only thing in his life he did not trust. Everything else in the shed worked. The vice worked. The pillar drill, which he had bought from a bankrupt garage in 1979, worked. The kettle worked, and had worked so long that the flex had gone the colour of gravy. The dog worked, though the dog was not a dog. The dog was half a tea urn, a length of chain, a lever and a bicycle bell, arranged so that when a car turned into the yard, the weight dropped, the chain ran, and something inside the urn went off with a noise very like a large animal that had been thinking about you for some time.

The dog had frightened three postmen, a man from the water board, and once, memorably, a vicar.

Outside, in the long grass along the fence, stood four decades of stock. Frighteners, mostly. That was what Ted called them, because that was what they were. They were what other people, if they had a word for them at all, would have called scarecrows, except that a scarecrow is a man made of straw who stands about looking sad, and a frightener is a machine.

Here is how you make one. You start with a swivel post, because the fen wind is the only free power source in eastern England and it never stops, not properly, not even in August. On the post you mount an old oil drum, off-centre, so that it turns unevenly. To the drum you bolt a bicycle wheel with the spokes bent, and to the wheel you hang chain, and to the chain you hang a mirror from a motorbike, and beside that the wing of a herring gull that died of natural causes on the drove road, dried and wired and shellacked, and beside that a rubber gardening glove with sand in two of the fingers so that it slaps.

The wind gets into it. The drum groans. The chain clatters against the drum. The mirror throws light about in a manner no bird has ever cared for. The glove slaps the drum like a man losing his temper very slowly. And the gull wing, which is the important part, moves the way a dying bird moves, and every pigeon within four hundred yards looks at it and decides to have its lunch somewhere else.

Ted had been making them for forty-one years. He had never in that time used the word art, and if you had used it near him he would have assumed you were talking about somebody called Art, and asked which one.

On the last Tuesday in March, Bill Braybrook drove into the yard, the dog went off, and Bill got out of his pickup with his hand on his chest.

"One of these days," said Bill, "that thing'll kill me."

"It's meant to," said Ted.

"It's meant to kill me?"

"It's meant to make a noise." Ted put down the file. "You've got pigeons."

"I have got," said Bill, "a biblical situation. Twenty acres of beet up like a lawn, lovely, and every wood pigeon in the county sat on it like they've bought tickets. And gulls. Where do they even come from, Ted? We're forty mile from the sea."

"Twenty-two."

"It's forty by road."

Ted considered this and let it go.

"I want a big one," said Bill. "Not one of your little ones. A big one. The one you did for Grimble."

"That was Beryl."

"Was it."

"Beryl's got two drums."

"Then I want two drums," said Bill, "and I want it named."

This was the custom, and Ted had never understood how it had started, only that it had, sometime in the eighties, and now no farmer between Hobsett and the Sixteen Foot would accept a frightener that had not been named. They named them after their fields, or their wives, or their wives' mothers, or, in one deeply unhappy case, after a man's first wife, which everybody agreed was the reason his second wife left. Beryl. Big Sandra. Terry. The Duke of Hobsett. Doreen, who stood in Alan Sowter's onions and had a hubcap where her face should be, and who had at one point been photographed by a bus tour without anyone thinking anything of it.

"Name?" said Ted.

"Kevin."

Ted's eyebrows moved about a millimetre. "Your brother-in-law's called Kevin."

"That's right."

"You told me at the ploughing match he was a waste of skin."

"I did say that," said Bill, with the satisfaction of a man whose earlier work is holding up. "He stands about in a field doing nothing, Ted. Twenty year I've watched him do it. And now I want something that stands about in a field doing nothing and is at least some use, and I want it called Kevin, and I want it big."

"Big Kevin," said Ted.

"Big Kevin," said Bill, and shook his hand on it, and that was how the most photographed object in British art acquired its name, in a yard on Sump Lane, in the rain, for forty pounds and a bag of potatoes.

It took eleven days. Ted made it nine feet high because Bill's beet field ran flat and open for half a mile and there was nothing to break the wind, and a nine-foot frightener on that ground would work like a lighthouse. He used two drums, one from a dairy and one that had held road paint, and because he had the paint drum he had a quarter-inch of hazard yellow left in the bottom, so when he had finished he stirred it up with a stick and painted BIG KEVIN on the flank in letters six inches high, because Bill would want to see the name from the road, and because Ted, who thought about very little, had a lifelong horror of a job not being finished off.

He added a dead radio. He always added a dead radio. It had no purpose at all except that the case had a grille in it and the grille made a noise like breathing, and Ted had noticed in 1988 that birds did not like breathing.

He stood it up in the yard on the Thursday to check the balance, and the wind came off the fen out of the north-west, and Big Kevin came round.

It was not a pretty noise. It was a groan out of the big drum, and then the chain going over like coins in a drier, and then the glove: slap. Slap. And the mirror sent a bar of light across the yard and up the side of the shed, and the gull wing lifted and fell as if it were still deciding.

A jackdaw that had been sitting on the fence for a fortnight left the parish.

Ted watched for eleven minutes, which was a long time for him, and then he made a small adjustment to the bearing, and then he went in and had his tea. He had beans, and two slices, and he ate them standing up at the sink because Chrissie had been dead four years and there was no longer any point in the table.

He was sixty-eight. His knuckles had started to knock in cold weather. He had a daughter in the village who thought he ate worse than he did, a nephew who came round to use the welder and left the gas on, and a brother he had not spoken to since 1974, for reasons he could no longer reconstruct beyond a caravan and an unpaid twelve pounds.

And he had a shed roof which, on his own private calculation, would outlast him by about eight months.

On the Saturday, Bill's boy came with the tractor and the post-hole borer, and they took Big Kevin out into the beet and set him up with his back to the north-west, and Bill said what he said every time, which was, "He'll do," and Ted said what he said every time, which was nothing, and drove home.

And for eight weeks that was the whole of it. Big Kevin stood in twenty acres of beet with nothing about him but sky, and turned, and groaned, and slapped, and the pigeons went to Grimble's instead, and Grimble bought a frightener, and Ted made a note in pencil on the inside of the shed door, which was where he kept his accounts.

Then, on the twenty-second of May, at seven minutes past eight in the evening, a woman called Miranda Pilkington put a hire car into a dyke a quarter of a mile away.